This week has sure opened with a bang for my online business… To start things off, I accepted the latest offer on my first digital product, and while I did sign a NDA (non-disclosure agreement) I can tell you it was a very fair offer that will go a long way towards my dream basement home theater project. :)
/bragging off
The other side of the news isn’t so hot, I’ve been advertising my new product for about a week as of today, and to say it’s under performing would be an understatement.
First it was the lack of traffic (was only pulling 8 clicks/day), then I changed some ads and opened up search and content advertising and that went up to 70+/per day… Finally, over the weekend I added Yahoo and MSN to the mix and ended up with 132 clicks today (Monday).,
With that number of clicks, I should be selling 1 e-book every day, two at the most. However in 1 full week I have sold nothing.
Now to be fair, I only solved the traffic issues late last week so the decisions I made today are based on roughly 400 clicks, which isn’t really that large of a test. But I was getting a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, so I decided something had to be done.
Now the one thing I want to avoid at ALL costs is a price war, but my primary competition dropped its price on the day I released my product… and while I might generate some sales by matching his price drop, it would take a lot of sales to turn any sort of meaningful profit at that point.
So if I can’t lower my price to compete, what can I do?
Make a better product & offer!!!
I actually got the idea from reading one of Ryan Diess’s products a few months back - this can take several forms, really:
A) You could switch mediums and have your book printed and generally go the “premium” product route.
B) Add more bonuses and a more compelling offer.
For myself, I do plan to go the premium route if I can sell at least 10 copies of the ebook a month, but for now I don’t want to take on the risk so I chose to go with B.
What this entailed for me was buying up a number of related e-books; my original product deals with dogs so I bought some books on dog food recipes, puppy training and holistic healing.
What I will now do is a little time consuming, but using the lessons I learn from reading these books, I will now create 2-3 bonuses. Ideally, the bonuses will start off with maybe 1/4th of the content a traditional ebook would have (say, 50 pages instead of 200). However, this will also enable me to build up a good back-end offer, should there actually be enough customers to justify the time to develop the “bonuses” into full-fledged products.
My goal right now is to write up the equivalent of 150 pages of written content before New Year’s; in the meantime I will test a few website variations in one to two week test periods to see if I can generate some sales.
‘Til next time…
